Italian physicist Sergio Ferrara, 74, has been awarded the prestigious Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the 'Oscars of science', the selection committee announced on Tuesday. Ferrara, a physicist at CERN, together with Daniel Z. Freedman (MIT and Stanford University) and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen (Stony Brook University), is being honored for "the invention of supergravity, in which quantum variables are part of the description of the geometry of spacetime", according to the website of the Breakthrough prize.

Ferrara is an INFN associate and a member of the Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles.